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Gallery: Japan’s Super GT series

What’s that embarrassingly worn-out cliché about waiting for a bus and so forth? After an agonisingly long tease, not only has the Subaru BRZ road car finally landed, so has a weightlifting, gym-honed sibling. That shiny blue automotive hammer you see above is a BRZ in full Super GT uniform. Why does this excite us? Because Japanese Super GT is the fastest race series in the world for road-going cars.

How fast is fast? Put it this way, Maserati tried to enter its MC12 racing car a few years back into Japan’s Super GT500 but it was deemed too slow (by almost a second a lap, entirely down to aerodynamics in corners).

Subaru’s BRZ will head for the slightly less mental GT300 class - the B league of Super GT. Cars are limited by air restrictors to 300bhp (GT500s all have 500bhp hand-built 3.4 litre V8s) and Subaru must keep the car as close to its road-going DNA as possible.

It is, however, allowed stupendous aerodynamic appendages, which is a good thing, chiefly because they look ruddy fantastic. This is fast becoming the BRZ we want.

While Subaru has never won a Super GT championship, it has competed in the GT300 series for many years, running an Impreza WRX STI from 2005 and then a Legacy (yes, you read that right) from 2009 to 2011. But Toyota isn’t fielding their identical GT 86. Oh no.

And word on the grapevine is that Toyota is planning to run a full-blooded GT300 racing version of California’s favourite hybrid: a Prius.

Thankfully, there are others. Have a flick through the best from both the GT300 and 500 fields and see if you can name them all…

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